Zif socket for Arduino

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has put out this nice tool. It’s a Zif socket for Arduino. If you’re doing a lot of flashing, this could be a nice addition to keep from having to pry your chip out every time. Plus, it looks cool in a soviet era technology kind of way.

I’ll second the ZIFduino. As a noob hobbiest, it was my first foray into microcontrollers, and exceeded my every expectation. As luck would have it, my first board would not work correctly. Mr. Bitty himself helped troubleshoot, and eventually replaced my kit with a fully assembled & tested board due to a bad FT232RL chip.

He LOST money on me, and did so politely and promptly. Best I can do is let you all know how satisfied I am, and what a great little board he has designed.

I grabbed one of these the first day EMS offered them. It’s way handy for, say, updating the bootloader on a Modern Devices RBBB. I also used it to burn sketches for the RBBB before I picked up my FTDI cable. I put machined pin sockets in for the resonator and capacitors so I can program chips that have the external oscillator fuses burned.

just so you know… soviet tubes will survive the Nuclear Apocalypse ^_^

and ZIF Sockets are really useful when you have an embedded design and can’t squeeze in a programming interface (I actually BETA tested a Dual Core Arduino board, and i ended up two of these things to re-program the chips… which actually had to share an i2c bus which would prevent programming anyways on-board…

the reason I built this (bought from EMS and assembled myself) is that I needed to be able to buy raw atmega chips and burn BOOTLOADERS into them. THAT’s why.

we make and sell arduino DIY projects and as a convenience to the user, we preload the software and BL into the chip. after the BL is loaded, the 6pin ISP connector is no longer needed and we can ‘get by’ with just the 6pin inline ftdi style connector; which doubles as serial port and download port.